eLearningCurve Update: Apr 5, 2016Career Growth and Your IT Professional Resume in a Data-Driven Economy

Career Growth and Your IT Professional Resume
in a Data-Driven Economy
By Jennifer Hay

We live and work today in a data-driven economy. Data is everywhere and is continuously collected from business, social, shopping, and personal activities. Successful companies thrive on data – something that was once relegated to record keeping, but today is at the heart of management and decision-making processes. That means that virtually every job in business is now a data-centric job, and that the best applicants are those who exhibit data literacy and data skills.

Your career growth in any business field is now accelerated or inhibited by your ability to work with data. The days of data as an IT specialty are gone, and the line between business and IT is blurred. Data skills are essential to be effective in finance, sales, marketing, operations, customer support, human resources, and many more functions and roles. No matter what your field, and no matter if you’re seeking a new job or growth with your current employer, you need to show data skills in your IT professional resume to get those growth opportunities.

What do you do, then, if you think you’re lacking in data skills? Begin by taking inventory. You probably have experience working with data that you don’t recognize as data skills. If you have worked with spreadsheets, then you have worked with data. The things that you have done in Excel translate directly to data skills, things that you have not yet done are opportunities to develop new skills.

All of this work is done in preparation for creating your IT professional resume and LinkedIn profile. Using the below phrases will help you create keyword rich documents that get you noticed.

If you have …

You have experience with

Entered data into rows and columns

Data Collection

Formatted and sorted data

Data Preparation

Found and fixed data errors

Data Cleansing

Calculated totals and averages

Data Summarization

Used complex formulas

Data Derivation & Transformation

Used array formulas and pivot tables

Data Structuring

Used trace dependents & precedents

Troubleshooting and Debugging

Linked cells across multiple worksheets

Data Relationships

Created charts and graphs

Reporting & Visualization

Written your own macros

Programming with Data

Found patterns and correlations

Data Analysis

Used add-ins like QI Macros & XLMiner

Analytics

Use the table above to make a quick inventory of your experience working with data. You’re almost certain to have experience in some of these twelve skill areas. Where you have experience, be sure to highlight it on your IT professional resume, in your LinkedIn profile, and as a topic of discussion in interviews.

Next look at the areas where you don’t have experience. Consider these areas as opportunities to develop new skills. The table of experiences is organized with more basic skills at the top and more advanced at the bottom. Look at your range of skills and consider where your most pressing gaps exist. Don’t look for quantum leap from data collection to advanced analytics. But do take the next logical step in growing your data competencies.

If you’re an Excel novice whose experience is limited to data collection and some data preparation, consider taking an Excel class to get to the next level. There are many good, low-cost classes both in classroom settings and online. If you’re well down the path of data structures and relationships, then press on to visualization and analysis. A very good, low-cost starting point in this area is the book Analyzing Business Data with Excel by Gerald Knight, which offers clear explanations and many exercises to practice on your own time and on your own computer.

Finally, with your data skills now recognized, connect them with your business skills. If, for example, your field is finance you can describe how the right data, organized and reported in the right ways helps to predict and manage cash flow. If you’re in facilities management, describe the important role of data skills in planning, scheduling, preventive maintenance, etc. Whatever your field may be, it is certain to have data dependencies. We live in an era where every business job is a data-centric job.

Jennifer Hay was the nation’s first certified resume writer in information technology (CRS+IT), and a natural choice for global IT professionals seeking high-impact career marketing documents (www.itresumeservice.com). Her innovative resumes and career branding images can be found in Expert Resumes for Computer and Web Jobs, Resumes that Pop! – Designs that Reflect Your Personal Brand, and Expert Resumes for Managers and Executives (3rd edition). Jennifer is certified in technical resume writing, career guidance, business intelligence, and information technology, and she has written articles that appeared in CIO.com, The Data Administration Newsletter (TDAN), Women in Technology (WITI), techrepublic.com, technical-resumes.com, and on her LinkedIn profile .

Click here to go back to all newsletters and the newsletter sign up form.